History of Oregon Du Drops Part IV

April Fools?

by James Stephen Du Bois

April Fool’s Day

There are those who believe that the derivation of April Fool’s Day is in remembrance of the time Noah sent a dove from the Ark before the the almighty flood had abated. The poor bird had no where to land. In some ancient cultures, on this ignominious anniversary, a master would send one or more servants on a meaningless errand just to commemorate what a fool (at least that dove thought) Noah had been on that day.

Well Cathleen and I noted that our flight left for Kauai, our agreed upon island, on April 1st and said, “What a day to start a new life. Ha, ha.” We thought we were immune to any potential April Fool’s Day effects. For one reason, every culture seems to have a different explanation for April Fool’s Day’s derivation. We were together and felt a high level of confidence in our ability to work through whatever would come up in our immediate future. However, in time, we found that there were issues, unknown from our perspective on the mainland, with which we would be faced, that may have changed our plans completely had we known of them.

Round Trip Tickets

As you are well aware, if you’ve been reading along, through the first three installments of The History of Oregon Du Drops, we were pinching pennies. We didn’t know how long it would take once we got to Kauai for us to find, let alone, set up a space where I could make Du Drops to support us, or how long it would take for us to find a little apartment to rent on the island, so we looked for the cheapest fare to get there. Ironically enough, the cheapest way turned out to be round trip tickets. “Why do we have to pay for both directions if we’re only going one way?” That question was never answered. “What made going one way more expensive than twice that distance?” No clue.

Cat and I landed in the thick, humid and flavor-filled tropical air––it smelled like my favorite sections of the produce department––with such high hopes. Our intention was to go to Kauai and try to integrate ourselves into the art and craft world there. With outdoor venues all year round, we thought we could avoid the winter lull we experienced in Oregon and be able to earn a steady income. We had agreed on Kauai because, even if it didn’t have as many potential customers as the big island, it still had plenty, and there we would have access to the rainiest spot on Earth, Wiamea Canyon.

Cat had lived on the big Island for 2 years, in what seems like a previous lifetime, and had warm relations with the only native Hawaiians in her subdivision. Her step-son and their son were pals. I had visited Kauai twice, in a different chapter of my life, once as a honeymooning haole tourist and once again while anniversarying there. I remember how everyone was so happy to see me and my mate-at-the-time at the hotels, restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. Big aloha smile.

Living on the Beach

This trip, however, everything was entirely different. Eventually, I wrote a letter to our friends, the ones who had sent us off with such wonderful wishes for joy and success, telling them about how our dream of moving to the islands permanently turned into our intense desire to get back to the Oregon coast as soon as possible. If you would like, you can read about our harrowing experiences there, and our life on the beach for the better part of a month, in my post, Aloha ha.

For example, when we would be in a store and ask a local resident behind the cash register where we could find a place to rent long-term, their whole attitude would immediately change from “Aloha” friendly to a very reserved demeanor. We were treated as just another couple of ravenous rich white people wanting to take up precious rental space from the local inhabitants, and in the process, and according to the law of supply and demand, drive up all of the other consumer prices as well. I wrote in my day book,
”We all look alike to the local population.”

Once we stopped being seen as tourists bolstering the local economy with our vacation money, and were viewed as competitors for limited resources, a wall appeared between us and whomever we were engaged with. It took me a little while to get over my programming of expecting to be greeted with open arms and a lei, but reality kicked me in the head pretty quickly when we had no place to live and no prospects but the beach.

We didn’t intend to take over the place, we just wanted to find a little niche in the art market and any place to live. We couldn’t even find a booth space. No one would let us in a show. One vegetable market allowed us to set up once, and we made a sale, but we were experiencing overt discrimination in getting into the art and craft fairs because we were not native. This was confirmed to me by a haole who married a native Hawaiian over thirty years ago and was still having difficulty obtaining booth spaces for his produce.

As far as housing, there just wasn’t any, period. Even garages were being inhabited. The only vacancies were at the big, expensive hotels and resorts. They would be happy to provide a sanitized place for us to stay and the big plastic smile I had become accustomed to on my two previous trips.

We lived on the beach––I was surprised to find that it’s not all that warm overnight in April at that latitude––in a tent with most of what we had left from our liquidation sale. What possessions of ours that we didn’t have with us, including about three gallons of collected Oregon rain from 1999 through March, 2003, were waiting to be shipped from my sister-in-law’s garage in Coos Bay, or already on their way from there to “The Land of Hannalei.” What we would do with them when they got there, we didn’t know. That issue turned out to be moot. Our first shipment never arrived, so we cancelled the others. We did our best and remained as positive as we could as we searched for a toehold.

We Make an Inevitable Decision

We are not programmed to think of gangs when we look at the Madison Avenue posters and video brochures of Hawaii; of the surf, the sun and the tranquil beaches filled with happy honeymooners and bronzed bikini-clad goddesses. Though invisible in the marketing campaigns, they exist and they intimidate and prey upon those having to live on the beach because of either poverty or the housing shortage on the island.

After reading the local newspaper accounts, and witnessing two separate instances of escalating violence, we moved off the beach just twenty one days into our Hawaiian odyssey and spent our last three days in a discount motel in paradise, temporarily disheartened, and waiting to go home. I had never felt the underlying tension on my previous tourist trips, insulated, as I was, from the reality of so many. Cat had a rosy view from her middle class neighborhood when she lived on the big island that faded as a bigger picture came into view. We both enjoyed our previous times in Hawaii, but we came to find this time that the common view of the islands was just a fantasy supported by the travel industry. The round-trip ticket we were forced into purchasing, and that I groused about not making any sense, was going to get us home, but it wouldn’t be honored until the twenty fourth. We were sentenced to Kauai for three full weeks.

While in the motel reflecting on our experience, and realizing that Hawaiians have been exploited since the first haoles licked their chops upon seeing the islands, we decided to return to the mainland and make our stand in Oregon. We didn’t want to offend anyone, or be a part of an unwanted invasion. We left the Kauaiians to themselves and the horde, of which we never wanted to be a part. In my day book I wrote, “A deep, rich, dark, malevolent rhythm pulses ‘neath the lie that is ‘Aloha’.” Another entry followed: “We choose not to participate in the rampant racism fostered, nurtured and thriving on Kauai; each race racing to erase the other races”.

During those twenty-one days we were on several different beaches. The State would only allow permits for a couple of days at a time so every forty-eight hours everyone would have to pack up and move to the next park for the next couple of days. In the midst of this chaos I created about a dozen Hawaiian Du Drops. They were the first ones I ever made outdoors. We ended up selling a couple of them to a chap and his daughter that we met there. They loved the idea of taking rain home from their trip. We thought a lot of people would, but the resistance we felt and our desire not to be where we weren’t wanted, overwhelmed that idea and we brought the rest of the Hawaiian Du Drops and about a quart of Kauaiian rain home; to the delight (Du Drops) and consternation (liter bottle of suspicious liquid) of the TSA representatives at the airport. This was when liquid was okay to bring on a plane, if the bottles passed a swab test.

Don’t Look Down. Keep Looking Up

Sure we had a ticket back home, but where was that going to be? We were in a bind. What were we going to do next? We had given twenty-one days of effort in survival conditions to make our idea work and we couldn’t get a glimmer of hope. This is where another one of my coping mechanisms came in handy. It’s the fourth one I’ve mentioned, based on my three core beliefs, which I will repeat here: I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, I am getting help from a beneficial non-physical agency, and everything will work out fine. This maxim is, “Don’t look down. Keep looking up.” This is a reminder for you to focus like a laser in the direction that is going to get you to your goal.

I learned this by the experience of climbing up radio towers and painting them on the way down (it’s very messy and temporarily confining, in the other direction; rookie mistake). Even someone fit, and a lover of heights, finds it helpful not to look to the ground while gaining altitude on a tower. Only after recovering from the exertion and exhilaration of climbing straight up a three hundred foot steel skeleton with a ten to fifteen pound bucket of paint attached to his or her belt is someone able to relax and take in the scenery.

This is an apt metaphor for continuing toward a goal in the face of fear and heavy difficulty. Focusing on the burden and the effort is like letting gravity pull you to the ground. Looking up, focusing on your goal is what will get you through and, only then, can you obsess about the trials and tribulations you had to overcome to get there, without them adversely affecting you. We had a bigger goal than making it in Kauai, and that is what we needed to focus upon, providing Du Drops for whom they are meant. We just had to find those people, or better yet, maybe we should let them find us.

I used to watch the seagulls at the beach in Yachats. They walked along the shoreline greeting each new wave as it came in and searched through the wet pulse of energy as it washed out. Occasionally, one of these omnivores would pluck a tasty morsel from the froth. Wave after wave after wave came, though with nothing in it.

These birds seemed to be accustomed to the fact that not every wave had something in it for them, but they also seemed to know that one of those waves held dinner. They just didn’t know which one. We adopted their attitude. Kauai just wasn’t our wave. So we were going home to explore options on the Oregon Coast that we had overlooked, or hadn’t created the first time we lived there.

Now that we are headed back to the Pacific Northwest, let’s revisit our question of why a round trip ticket is less expensive than a one-way one. The following idea came to me based upon Cat’s and my experience. I’m no conspiracy theorist, except for the real ones, but maybe the Hawaiian State government has a deal with the airlines to make it easy for people to leave once they have exhausted their resources––keep the tourist rotation continuing without accumulating stranded visitors. The airlines could be making their money back with state kickbacks and the state could still be saving oodles in social service expenses.

I’m sure there are other possible explanations, but something is not adding up in the one-way, round-trip calculus. Whatever the reason, we benefited. After we couldn’t even get into an art or craft fair, flea market or consignment shop, and were left sleeping on the beach for lack of housing, and repeatedly warned about the gangs that occasionally marauded through the beach camps, we were relieved to use the second half of our round trip ticket.

We may have been April fools or, at best, uninformed naifs, but our experience convinced us that we needed to go back and expand our lives in Oregon, Cat’s native, and my adopted home. We received the message, loud and clear. Somehow, we would open a little shop on Highway 101, and let it bring wave after wave of urban day-trippers and international passersby by, to have their attention grabbed by the swinging Oregon Du Drop-filled, mobiles floating in our front yard.

How we ended up realizing such a dream come true is related in The History of Oregon Du Drops Part V: Home Sweet Rockaway Beach, coming to this blog soon.